Parliament to Resume Debate on Electoral Law

The following articlewas published by Reidar Visser, an historian of Iraq educated at the University of Oxford and currently based at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. It is reproduced here with the author’s permission. Any opinions expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Iraq Business News.

It’s almost four years since Iraq’s general elections of 2010 and new elections are scheduled for early 2014. Iraq wouldn’t be Iraq if there wasn’t some kind of problem on the political horizon, and this time it consists of changes to the electoral law that need to be done in time in order that the electoral commission (IHEC) can starts its technical preparations for the ballot. The Iraqi parliament has given itself until 30 October to adopt the changes, and the debate is scheduled to start this coming week of 21 October.

The immediate reason there has to be changes to the election law is simple. A federal supreme court ruling from June 2010 decided that the current system of seat distribution using the largest remainder principle in a proportional system of 18 multi-member constituencies was “unconstitutional” and that a more proportional system would need to be adopted.

In line with this, the Iraqi parliament made changes to the local elections law before the provincial elections earlier this year, by introducing the Sainte Lague method for distributing seats.

The reason the current law was deemed unconstitutional was that its use of the largest remainder principle was found by the supreme court to be in conflict with one of the basic axioms of the Iraqi constitution, which says that no law that contradicts the principles of democracy can be adopted. This conclusion by the court is both esoteric and astonishing.

In what amounted to a mutual ball-gag between the Shiite Islamists and Kurds that crafted the new Iraqi constitution in 2005, “principles of democracy” as well as the “basic tenets of Islam” were given status as the unalienable main points of reference for all Iraqi legislation. This arrangement was useful there and then since the political process got moving (and quite a few American academics waxed lyrical about it); however, it was probably never intended to be taken very literally given the abstract nature of the concepts referred to.

And it seems truly wild for the supreme court to extrapolate from the very general “principles of democracy” – whatever those may be – to a level of detail where it is suggested that the Sainte Lague method for distributing seats is somehow “democratic” whereas the largest remainder method isn’t.